


A Treatise Concerning Religious Affectations

by forthegreatergood



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Bickering, Coming Untouched, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Metaphysical Sex, Mild Sexual Content, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Pining, abuse of ecstatic states, ineffable orgasms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-18 14:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21878839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: After an argument about Crowley taking care of a job for Aziraphale, an angel gets a demonstration of how exactly a demon can inspire religious ecstasy.“Crowley, you can’t have given the woman an ecstatic episode,” Aziraphale said, trying for reasonable and hearing the hollow flatness of his own voice with a wince. “It calls for grace--”“Oh, it doesnot,” Crowley snapped, throwing his arms wide and shaking his head.  He wasn’t shouting, but it was a near thing, and Aziraphale could feel the way he wanted to shout almost as loud as if he’d gone ahead and done it. “It doesn’t, and you’d know it if you ever listened to a word out of my mouth.”
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 49
Kudos: 406
Collections: Good Omens (Complete works)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and the respective production and licensing companies.
> 
> A huge thank you to [foxyk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxyk/pseuds/foxyk) for betaing!
> 
> * * *
> 
> Content note: The "sex" is them manipulating the nervous system and blood and brain chemistry of one another's corporations in order to produce an orgasm without the attendant physical sexual activity that would normally include, and the incidents are more romantically than sexually charged. Neither of them verbalize it as an explicitly sexual experience, and Crowley deliberately stops manifesting genitalia before letting Aziraphale begin when it's his turn.

Aziraphale blinked awake and immediately winced at the bright light streaming in through the bookshop window. His head felt like he’d been kicked by a mule, and his mouth felt like he’d tried to eat a bale of hay without so much as a side of sorrel sauce to help it down.

“Oi, you’re up!” Crowley said, his voice frightfully loud even carrying as it was from the back room.

“I’m awake,” Aziraphale countered, trying to muster enough strength to actually lift himself from the cushions. “I’m very decidedly not up.”

“’bout time, too. I thought I was going to have to bring your dinner home in a bag.” Crowley refused to moderate his volume even the slightest bit, and Aziraphale thought the demon must have finally decided to persecute him in this, his hour of weakness. Was he rampaging about the shop, bellowing at the top of his lungs out of revenge for some petty slight, or was it simple infernal whim?

“I couldn’t possibly eat a bite,” Aziraphale groaned. Or sit up. Sitting up in the next half-hour wasn’t on either. If there was any speck of decency still left in Crowley’s blackened, blasted soul, he’d be speaking in a whisper and dabbing at Aziraphale’s brow with a cool cloth while commiserating.

And then he was staring blearily into a pair of dark glasses, two great holes in Crowley’s handsome face, and he could neither deal with that nor roll over and ignore it.

“Come on, angel,” Crowley sighed, taking his hand and rubbing his knuckles. Aziraphale felt a smidge better with Crowley at least making an attempt to soothe him, and then he remembered the demon was only taking advantage of his state and scowled at him. “It’s just a little hangover, you can take care of it all by yourself, yeah?”

Aziraphale grimaced, snatched his hand back, and stared past Crowley at the damnably ineffective blinds covering the windows. What good were they if they didn’t even keep out the morning sun? He groaned and threw his arm across his eyes.

“I won’t. I’m not doing it.” Aziraphale could _feel_ Crowley, still crouched by the head of the couch, even though the awful creature had forgotten to keep breathing now that he wasn’t using the air to talk. “You can’t make me. And breathe, won’t you? It’s like being haunted by the ghost of beatniks past.”

“Fine.” There was the distinct rustle of denim and linen as Crowley straightened up again. “Don’t say I didn’t try. I’ll bring you back a lasagne alla molisana, yeah? Maybe pick up one of those fatal cheesecakes you like so well from Chez--”

“Lasagne for breakfast?” Aziraphale asked plaintively. That really was beyond the pale; he’d barely be able to manage a bit of toast with jam and clotted cream. Crowley was definitely trying to discorporate him.

“Dinner, angel,” Crowley corrected, his tone all careful handling and padded edges. “It’s time for dinner.”

“That’s not…” Aziraphale groaned and pushed himself upright through a herculean effort. He blinked at the blinds again. If the sun was coming in like that, then it was going down. Which meant that it was, in fact, time for dinner. He wanted to lie right back down again until Crowley took the hint and fetched him a glass of chilled juice and an ice pack. This was all his fault--a little pampering through the aftereffects of his fiendish plot was the least he could do. “All that after just an hour?”

Crowley frowned and cocked his head. “An hour?”

“Well, we only opened the…” Mead. It had been mead, and no wonder he felt like he was about to fall off his bones. He had never, not once, even come close to keeping his head after a few cups of mead. Which Crowley knew, the cheeky devil.

Aziraphale waved his hand and braced his forehead on his other arm, and Crowley waited, vaguely befuddled, for him to remember how to speak English.

“I closed up the shop, and we opened the mead that _you_ brought.” Blame where blame was due, at least, and Crowley looked mildly affronted at his tone. “And if the sun’s going down, that was only a few hours ago at most.”

“Angel, that was yesterday.”

Aziraphale tried to focus on him, but there were suddenly two of him, and wasn’t that just like a demon?

“Would you please get your head right?” Crowley asked, that frustrated little growl of a sigh slipping under Aziraphale’s patchy defenses like an expert thrust. It stiffened his back and made an uncomfortable warmth pool low in his belly, and if Aziraphale hadn’t been feeling so thoroughly rotten, he might have dragged Crowley into his lap and demanded the demon tempt him some more. It belatedly occurred to him that he might still be tipsy, and good Lord, but they must have tied one. What had he been thinking, letting Crowley ply him with drink like that? He knew the fetching beast would keep his cup brimfull with no regard whatsoever for the next morning, smiling bright as the sun and just as warm even as he smoothed Aziraphale’s path to perdition.

Aziraphale tried to focus, tried to concentrate on what he needed power for and what he needed that power to do, and failed miserably. He tried a second time, and instead of focusing on that, he found himself staring instead at Crowley’s lips. Not pretty, or soft, or lush, but that wouldn’t have suited Crowley’s face at all, would it? No, they were… clever. Never at rest, always ready to let Aziraphale know exactly what the demon was thinking, even when he wasn’t saying anything. Aziraphale closed his eyes, and the third time was the charm.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” Aziraphale sighed, leaning forward and bracing his elbows on his knees. He had in fact still been a bit drunk, and now he was still in fact a bit hung over. “Whyever did you let me try to sleep it off?”

“Pretty blessed insistent on it, angel,” Crowley protested. He grinned, affection bleeding through the amusement at Aziraphale’s expense. Aziraphale could have mistaken him for innocent in all this, if it hadn’t been for what and who he was. That beguiling smile was as good as a sworn witness against him, given those two immutable facts. “I was going to miracle you sober myself, but you grabbed my hands and said ‘don’t you dare’ in that voice you use when you forget you haven’t got a flaming sword to back it up with.”

Aziraphale tried to parse through the muddle of the previous evening, and he had the brief flash of Crowley’s face, flushed so beautifully and with no glasses hiding half of it, his golden eyes narrowed with concentration. Aziraphale was rather certain his next brilliant move after refusing to be sobered up would have been to kiss the demon. He was also rather certain Crowley wouldn’t be standing here like this, at his ease and gently querulous, if Aziraphale had gone through with that cunning plan.

“But I had a job this morning.” Aziraphale scrubbed at his scalp with his fingernails, trying to think. They’d been so snidely specific, and so awfully smug. The message had left absolutely no room for any sort of improvisation, probably just so they could reprimand him when he muffed it, and it had very definitely been scheduled for this morning. The wee hours, in fact, just before dawn. He’d been appalled at that around everything else--he didn’t sleep, no, but God-fearing people were tucked up safe and snug in their homes at that hour, not gadding about sneaking up on people lost in prayer.

“Yeah, well. You were in no fit state to do it, obviously,” Crowley said, shrugging those sharp shoulders of his. 

They’d fit perfectly in Aziraphale’s hands, and why was it so difficult to stop thinking about this? He’d fixed himself, hadn’t he? And what hadn’t been fixed had left a dull throb that should have been enough to knock foolish thoughts of petty indulgence out of reach for a bit. Crowley was very much not going to coddle him. Crowley would, in fact, mock him extensively--if with some sympathy--in the event that he expressed a desire for Crowley to coddle him. Bad enough he’d have to drag himself Upstairs, proverbial hat in hand, to apologize for the oversight and beg for another chance. He didn’t have to add insult to injury and have Crowley teasing him about his peccadillos.

“I took care of it for you,” Crowley continued blithely. “Figured you could use the kip. Been centuries since the last time you had a lie-in.”

“You…” Aziraphale sat back and stared at him, feeling somehow as if Crowley had slapped him. “You.”

No, this was worse. He’d rather Crowley had slapped him, rather Crowley had smiled at him and then struck him down.

“Part of the arrangement, innit?” Crowley asked, his smile curling up enough to show his teeth. He was pleased with himself, the bastard--almost preening with it, the way he did when he’d been clever and was waiting for Aziraphale to tell him so. “It’s no bother, angel. You’d have done the same for me.”

“But.” Aziraphale closed his eyes and tried not to curse. Oh, what had the demon been thinking? Of course Crowley’s shoulders would fit perfectly in his hands--he’d been created to shake some sense into the irresponsible fiend like a terrier with a rat. “Crowley, it was a personal vision!”

“Yeah?” Crowley raised his eyebrows, then crossed his arms when he caught Aziraphale’s meaning. The smile curdled on his face, souring as Aziraphale watched. “You only went over every aspect ad nauseum. Could’ve done it in my sleep, after the lecture you launched into half-way through the second bottle.”

“Crowley, an _angel_ was to _appear_ before this woman,” Aziraphale reminded him. Crowley couldn’t possibly think Aziraphale was going to be happy he’d run such a ridiculous risk for such a tiny thing, never mind encourage a repetition. How could Crowley think it would go unnoticed, a demon seizing on the faithful and delivering… well, God only knew what. Some fraudulent, sneering mockery of a revelation, probably. Crowley couldn’t help it, couldn’t help being what he was, but he could certainly help the sort of chances he took over it.

“Yeah, and?” Crowley’s lips tugged down at one edge, like they did when Aziraphale was blundering into deeper water than he ought, and perhaps this wasn’t the way to get Crowley to reconsider. “Not like I don’t know what your lot look like.”

“And give her a vision. A _holy_ vision,” Aziraphale continued, because the part of his brain that knew it was better to apologize and be quiet for a few minutes wasn’t talking to the part of his brain that was currently in control of his mouth. 

Of course, with Crowley playing it off like what he’d done wasn’t stupidly dangerous, maybe it was for the best that Aziraphale lacked the wherewithal to leave it be at the moment. He was too lenient with the demon as it was, which led directly and inevitably to things like this. Of the two of them, being wise and watchful and dutiful fell to Aziraphale as a matter of course, didn’t it? A demon couldn’t help their penchant for self-destruction; Aziraphale was neglecting him when he excused himself and took things back and smoothed down ruffled feathers instead of standing his ground.

“A vision’s a vision,” Crowley said, his tone going cool as pavement on a winter’s morning. “Which yes, she had, and yes, it conformed in every respect to the directives in your letter,” Crowley jerked his head at the unsealed and half-crumpled missive on Aziraphale’s desk, “and the interpretation you maundered about at length.”

“Accompanied by an ecstatic--” Aziraphale broke off and waved a hand, and damn how easily he lost the high ground with Crowley. Paroxysm, they’d called them once. Trance was the preferred euphemism these days, he thought. _Fit_ , was what Crowley always said, with no small amount of glee in his voice at calling it as he saw it. “Erm. Episode.”

“Yeah, got that all taken care of, too,” Crowley told him, scowling. “Amazing--instructions so simple and detailed that even a demon can follow them. Think I’ll tackle a paint-by-numbers book next, see if I can manage it. Not getting my hopes up, mind, but I feel like I’m really making strides with this whole--”

“Crowley!” Aziraphale protested miserably. His head hurt, and he couldn’t think straight, and it wasn’t fair how even Crowley’s welfare wasn’t enough to make him stand firm in the face of Crowley being upset with him. What inferior clay had She molded him from, that something so important couldn’t steel his resolve.

Crowley caught the edge of suffering in his voice and hissed, frame jerking angrily as he turned away. It promised a continuation of the argument, but not until Aziraphale was feeling better. “Look, I’m going to grab dinner. I’ll drop yours by on my way, no need to thank me.”

And that had torn it, hadn’t it? Crowley was hurt--peeved that he’d tried to do something nice for Aziraphale and was getting scolded for it instead of thanked. He was smothering his ire now to nurse it later, bottle it up and concentrate it and draw from it as he wanted. The sulky thing would be impossible for the next month if Aziraphale didn’t apologize now, and for anything he could possibly have given offense over. 

If only this was something Aziraphale could leave alone, it would all have been so much easier.

“Crowley, you can’t have given the woman an ecstatic episode,” Aziraphale said, trying for reasonable and hearing the hollow flatness of his own voice with a wince. “It calls for grace--”

“Oh, it does _not_ ,” Crowley snapped, throwing his arms wide and shaking his head. He wasn’t shouting, but it was a near thing, and Aziraphale could feel the way he wanted to shout almost as loud as if he’d gone ahead and done it. “It doesn’t, and you’d know it if you ever listened to a word out of my mouth.”

“It does, and you know I do.” Aziraphale tried to quiet the buzz in his skull that refused to subside no matter how thoroughly he sobered or healed himself. 

How much had he even had to drink? He’d been so upset about the whole job, from the way Sandalphon had dropped it off with his overly-cheerful “Good luck!” to the way Gabriel had spelled everything out in such laborious detail that it would have been faster and easier for the archangel to have just done it himself. Every last bit of it had stung, an amuse-bouche preceding the three-course castigation he’d no doubt receive as soon as he failed. Crowley had waltzed in with his mead and his sympathy and his charming smile and his oh-so-subtle temptation to have a drink, complain a bit, and then have another drink, and the rest was lost in the booze-soaked bog of his corporation’s brain. 

Not that Aziraphale needed memory, not when they’d carved channels in rock with how often they moved through the steps of it. Crowley would have taken his glass every time it threatened to empty, the silken skin of his fingers brushing over the back of Aziraphale’s hands, palm sliding against palm when he returned it full and heavy. Crowley would have smirked, eyes lighting with a perilously tender pride at how easily he flustered an angel, face tilted toward Aziraphale like a moth contemplating a candle. Aziraphale knew that answering burst of pride too well, that swell of longing that came when he saw how responsive Crowley really was to his approval. He went so damnably grasping and desperate, when Crowley looked at him like that.

Just as he went so shrinking and pathetic, when Crowley looked at him like this. Aziraphale told himself to be a principality for once, just once in his entire existence. “Crowley, please. You can’t just--”

“Whatever,” Crowley said, clearly rolling his eyes behind his glasses. “I’m not skipping a four-star meal at the hottest establishment in London to have this conversation. Ciao.”

He stalked out of the shop while Aziraphale was still trying to get his bearings, stiff-arming the door open without even slowing down. Aziraphale rubbed his forehead and tried to think. He’d upset the serpent, that much was obvious--given Crowley’s pride a good sticking, wounded his vanity. He hadn’t expected it, either, which always made the demon even more cross. A blow he could brace for, he took with better grace than one that caught him by surprise. But Aziraphale hadn’t been telling him anything Crowley hadn’t already known, even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself.

It didn’t make any sense for Crowley to dig in his heels like that and insist that he’d carried off the job, just like that. They both knew that whatever Crowley might have done wouldn’t fit the bill; it would out, soon if not immediately. Crowley was lovely, of course, but he wasn’t so fair that he could be mistaken for an angel even to a human’s woefully circumscribed vision. Crowley could persuade people into all sorts of things, but the conviction that they’d had a revelation from God Herself wasn’t one of them.

“Blast it all,” Aziraphale muttered to himself. Crowley couldn’t really have talked himself into thinking all of it, could he? 

His gaze drifted to the closed door, the bell still swaying slightly on its spring. No. It was something else. Something else, and comparatively serious--Crowley hadn’t stomped off in the middle of a quarrel like that since Aziraphale had accused him of being responsible for the Falklands debacle. Maybe Aziraphale should call his mobile and apologize?

Aziraphale bit his lip. Apologize for what, though? For stating a known fact? For anything that came to mind until it felt like he was getting close to the meat of it?

He shook himself. The last thing he should do was apologize. All the little errands they’d traded before had been a matter of convenience, of maintaining diplomatic ties and reifying their personal peace accord. Crowley had never trusted him with anything big, and he’d never trusted Crowley with anything really important. It would have been monstrously irresponsible, for one thing, and monstrously dangerous for another. Crowley just deciding on a whim to handle a job guaranteed to be heavily scrutinized was asking for trouble, and it was the sort of trouble Aziraphale couldn’t just blather their way out of or pretend wasn’t happening.

And it wasn’t as if he’d even considered asking for Crowley’s help; letting Crowley anywhere near the thing was the worst move he could have made. So Crowley had thought he was being helpful--all right, but how was that Aziraphale’s fault? Crowley should have at least asked first, if he’d wanted thanks. 

And God help them both if anyone had been quite literally keeping tabs on Aziraphale’s performance and seen the serpent of Eden sneak up, do everything more or less to spec, and then sneak off again. Aziraphale thought he might be able to pretend shock and accuse Crowley of having gotten the better of him, and Crowley could certainly ham it up and demand a commendation from Hell for his deviousness, but they’d have to avoid each other’s company for centuries before the heat died down again.

All things considered, Aziraphale would have preferred to handle the job himself and take his lumps over flubbing it twenty times over to risking any of it.

He slumped back against the cushions and miracled himself a cup of tea. Damn Crowley’s impetuousness. Why the demon couldn’t have been content to just curl up on the couch with him until he sobered back up, Aziraphale didn’t know. It was at least something he wouldn’t have blinked at thanking Crowley for, even if he might have blushed at it until the demon’s eyes narrowed and his smile went sly. Aziraphale sipped his tea and tried to ignore how empty the shop felt with Crowley gone.

* * *

Crowley slouched down in his chair until he was practically slithering out of it and picked vindictively at his dinner. He’d been looking forward to this all week, and he’d barely tasted what little he’d actually bothered to eat. He should have known enough to turn around and walk right back out of the shop the moment he’d seen the look on Aziraphale’s face. He should’ve dropped off the mead, said it was for afters and he hadn’t wanted it hanging around his flat, tempting him, until it was time to drink it, and he should’ve have walked the fuck away.

Did it ever get him anywhere but stung with rebuke to try and comfort the fractious thing? Aziraphale would let Crowley pet him and soothe him and shower him with gifts, but there was always some line to cross, hidden like a tripwire and waiting to blow everything sideways on him. There was always some point where it turned into too much and had Aziraphale shoving him away and acting like he’d orchestrated the whole thing just to upset the angel. Like Crowley was some moustache-twirling villain in one of the old silent films, all devious machinations and designs on the swooning heroine. Like Crowley had done something wrong in trying to help.

Crowley shoved his plate away and signaled the waiter for another drink. The ridiculous pomegranate cocktail was a poor substitute for rosy cheeks plumping in a satisfied smile, and the waiter had earned his ten percent by telling Crowley the name of it with a straight face, but if he was going to drown the sorrow of eating alone in something, it might as well be made of champagne and ginger and orange peel and pomegranate juice.

Crowley scowled at his empty glass and told himself it would serve Aziraphale right if he didn’t bring him dinner, after all. The angel’d been so blessed upset about that stupid note, and Crowley had caved like he always did. Aziraphale had been another glass or two away from throwing himself into Crowley’s arms and sobbing into Crowley’s shoulder over how needlessly unkind they always were to him, how quick to find fault and how they waited for him to fail and how it seemed they were more pleased with a chance to call him onto the carpet than with a job well done, and it had all been so infuriating. 

Crowley could have complained of the exact same things about his bosses, and if Heaven was going to go around with its nose in the air about how much better they were than Hell, they could at least fucking act it. And what had Aziraphale ever done to deserve it? Sending one principality to guard the whole blessed garden--they might as well have been setting him up to fail from the first. Continuing to punish him for it without giving him any further resources or back-up was just rubbing salt into the wound. Crowley had wanted to wrap his arms around Aziraphale and wipe away his tears and promise him it would all be all right so badly that he’d practically been able to see that shy, relieved smile, to hear that sighed “Oh, _thank you_.”

Blessed fucking idiot, that’s what he was. One quiver of those plump lips, one nervous flutter of those sumptuous hands, and Crowley might as well have all the brains God gave a slug. Crowley’s lip curled back. At least slugs _used_ the brains God gave them--they might pitch themselves headlong into a bowl of beer and drown in a drunken stupor, but at least they waited until they had it real and solid in front of them to try. He could burn himself alive with just the thought of that exquisite bastard melting against him, grateful and admiring and feeling that first blushing wisp of desire. _Leave it to me, angel, leave everything to me._ Bowing and scraping for crumbs, and how many times had he sworn to himself that he wouldn’t? He’d lost track, stopped counting once he hadn’t even been able to believe he’d stick to it as he was swearing he would. 

Crowley snatched his fresh drink off the table and sucked half of it down in one go. He should have made Aziraphale ask him for it--really, he should have. Made the coy bastard tell him what it was that Aziraphale wanted him to do, made him cop to it. But that was always the step Aziraphale wouldn’t, or more likely _couldn’t_ , bring himself to take, and insisting on it seemed cruel, practically on the verge of making him beg. Aziraphale shouldn’t have had to ask, not when he’d all but drawn Crowley a road map to exactly what he wanted. 

It would be like listening to Aziraphale witter away about how lovely the seaside was this time of year and all the flowers blooming and the water just right and the crowds just dense enough to hide them but not so bad that a person couldn’t get anywhere with them and then _not_ suddenly having a pressing temptation to perform in Margate. Aziraphale was usually clear as crystal about what it was he wanted, even if the circumstances made him express it in the form of an elaborate and deniable dance. But Satan help him, it stung when that lack of saying the words meant Aziraphale could turn around and pretend it had been Crowley’s idea and Crowley’s doing and all in furtherance of Crowley’s wicked schemes.

It would have been one thing if the angel had any idea of fair play, but he’d been too long under Heaven’s thumb not to show his teeth when he felt cornered. It would have been one thing if it didn’t do blessed more than sting, thinking that Aziraphale only came to him because he’d never make Aziraphale ask.

The one time Crowley had tried to call him on it--“I did it for you! I did it because you as good as got down on your knees and pleaded with me to do it!”--had seen Aziraphale turn cold as ice and stand back and look at Crowley like he’d turned rotting and foul right then and there.

_“I don’t remember asking you to do any such thing.”_

Crowley had wanted to crawl under a rock and never come out at the tone Aziraphale had taken, because no, of course Aziraphale hadn’t _asked_ , not flat out like that. That wasn’t how this thing between them went. It wasn’t like the arrangement, where it was all business, and the occasional bit of fudging a coin toss or inventing a matching assignment from whole cloth could be overlooked as professional rivalry. Accusing Aziraphale of wanting something for himself, of asking for something on his own behalf, was apparently a mortal sin. If Crowley wanted to commit it, that was all fine and good, but he’d be showing himself for what he was--something spewed forth from the Pit and best cast back into it as quickly as possible. It had been a shot across the bow if ever there was one, and no mistaking it.

Crowley could have this, so long as he knew his fucking place about it. He closed his eyes and scrubbed at his jaw. Not like he hadn’t gotten used to a lot worse for a lot less of a reward. It was just maddening, constantly feeling like he was on the verge of getting more and hardly ever daring to reach for it. Sometimes he felt like a wolf prowling at the door when Aziraphale sat there wanting--wanting so blessed much--and not-asking him for things.

Crowley could try to make him ask and then sit there watching Aziraphale be miserable at not getting what he wanted because he couldn’t ask. Crowley could point out that Aziraphale had all but asked and then suffer through that scorching, righteous _look_. The third option--making Aziraphale happy and occasionally having to suffer in silence through a bit of pious repudiation because he’d been too quick or too thorough or too vigorous in his effort to make Aziraphale happy--wasn’t always comfortable, but it was a sight better than the first two. 

Seeing Aziraphale forlorn when Crowley had the power to please him was its own kind of torture, just like seeing how ready the angel might be to wash his hands of Crowley was a terror Crowley couldn’t face. 

Couldn’t and wouldn’t--he’d be fucking certain of that. So long as Crowley remembered his place, he could shelter under an angel’s wing and watch the garden drink in the rain and forget he’d gotten booted out of paradise. It was good enough, most days.

Of course, most days Aziraphale wasn’t just the right side of weeping at some small-minded slight that someone with infinitely better things to do had nevertheless sat down and meticulously crafted for maximum effect. Crowley spun his fork in his fingers.

It had been sheer madness, that note Aziraphale had gotten. Crowley had seen a few of Heaven’s cables, either because Aziraphale left them lying about or because Dagon had gotten their slimy claws on one and was showing it around the office like a trophy. Uriel’s were probably the most verbose, and that was only her trying to be precise--coordinates for this, see enclosed picture for that. Michael’s were typically no more than a sentence or two; they didn’t see the need for more, not when an angel should know their business. 

Whoever it was who’d sat down and written the fucking novel Aziraphale had gotten this time had known exactly how it would come across, with an iron-clad plausible deniability built right into it. The idea that Aziraphale was too incompetent to be trusted with knotting his own bowtie in the morning was implied in every overly-specific instruction nested within an overly-specific instruction, but none of it rose to an explicit cause for complaint. 

It had probably been Gabriel, Crowley thought venomously. The fucker seemed to have some particular dislike of Aziraphale, honed to a razor-sharp edge over the course of millennia and just waiting to draw blood from an angel who’d already known too much unhappiness.

Crowley stabbed a chanterelle with his fork and ate it, chewing away as if Aziraphale was there to coax him out of the sulk. He’d been so proud of himself for ferreting out this restaurant, with its chef all but hand-picked to make something that would have Aziraphale humming and groaning to himself as he ate. He’d been circling the menu for almost a full month, waiting for the seasonals to shift just right for the biggest number of best choices. 

It had been a little worrisome, how upset Aziraphale had seemed last night and how stubborn the angel had gotten about letting Crowley miracle him sober, but Crowley had thought he’d known how to fix it right up.

After all, it wasn’t like _he_ could take some idiot archangel’s snide instructions personally. Aziraphale knew what it meant, and it touched him to the quick, and Crowley was outraged on his behalf. But actually carrying the thing out? It had been like yawning through one of Baphomet’s summoning rehearsals. A Prince of Hell with nothing better to do than rally the troops and make sure they all got the dark majesty and terror and stagecraft right in the event that a mortal wanted to talk to them badly enough to ring them up--Crowley didn’t feel quite so pathetic compared to that. 

But it meant that Crowley could mum his way through a ritual that held no emotional freight backwards in high heels, at this point. An archangel had gotten themselves too invested in the pageantry of a thing and wanted a principality-shaped puppet to go through the motions of it? Fine--Crowley was a willing and able subcontractor with no skin in the game.

Or at least he hadn’t had any skin in the game before Aziraphale had all but called him incompetent to his face and looked at him like he’d dumped out an ashcan on the angel’s favorite rug. Now, suddenly, the whole thing was like being caught in the middle of something shameful, like seeing every nasty name Aziraphale had ever heard demons called playing out on the angel’s face and knowing he was thinking it even if he’d never be so crass as to actually speak them aloud. 

And how many times had Crowley explained that an ecstatic state was just chemicals and suggestion, human brains responding to stimulus and circumstance? It had been at least once a century for a while there, every time some white-winged imbecile accidentally killed someone instead of imparting the divine inspiration they’d been trying for, or one of Hell’s more energetic Lords managed to suck in enough followers to make with the orgiastic rituals and the formalized worship and the true believers.

“How could they possibly get so many people worshipping them?” Aziraphale had asked.

Crowley didn’t really know the beginnings of it, given the personalities of the demons in question, but he’d gamely explained the mechanics of inducing something that passed for divine rapture. It went without saying if a bunch of people were going to put on stupid masks, strip bare on a windy hilltop, and dance around making absolute idiots of themselves in a demon’s name, they were owed a few hours worth of hands-free orgasms if nothing else.

He had, in fact, gamely explained it at least a dozen times by now, all told, and Crowley was running out of ways to say that the agents of Heaven didn’t have a lock on endorphins. Going around shoving undiluted grace at humans had about the same outcome as going around shoving undiluted grace at demons--somewhere between memorably unpleasant and catastrophically bad. It was a sin-free creatures only kind of deal, and so far as Crowley knew, the Romans had taken care of the last of those to pop up among humans going on two thousand years ago now. No, the best way to create the effect was to set the stage and then start cranking up the naturally-occurring chemicals in the target’s brain; the whole affair was a lot more forgiving, when it was all stuff that belonged there in the first place. 

Plus it was less likely to generate the despairing, painful withdrawal symptoms that a direct application of power could produce, the sort of thing that had people starving themselves and whipping their backs to shreds in an attempt to get back to the fun part. There was a place for the stick along with the carrot in the average Duke’s repertoire, but Crowley didn’t figure it for something angels needed. It seemed in the best interests of everybody who might give a damn about anybody’s best interests to just use the gentler method and call it a day.

And of course, functionally there wasn’t a difference between an angel spurring along an extra dose or five of hormones in a person’s blood and a demon doing the same. It was telling that Aziraphale simply couldn’t wrap his pretty blond head around the concept, wasn’t it? Or maybe it was just the difference between an angel doing it and Crowley doing it, the idea that there was something particularly noxious about Crowley’s deeds that would always out. Which was just…

Crowley stabbed another chanterelle and tried to avoid thinking about all the implications that one had. He dismissed the idea with prejudice, after a long and uncomfortable moment. Aziraphale never batted an eyelash at drinking liquor he’d miracled up or eating food he’d miracled warm or snuggling into a cloak he’d miracled clean and dry. Either Aziraphale was a consummate actor and putting those services to use toward Satan only knew what end, which seemed unlikely, or Aziraphale simply thought humans were a great deal more discerning about where their holy orgasms were coming from.

“News flash, angel: they very decidedly are not,” Crowley muttered, finishing his cocktail. 

People saw what they wanted to see, and people felt what they wanted to feel. If someone loved God enough to spend three days straight praying, they’d interpret a flood of dopamine and oxytocin and vasopressin coming at the right moment as evidence of exactly what they wanted--God loving them right back. It didn’t matter one whit if it was the result of an angel, a demon, or a pair of knickers gone a bit too tight from all the prostrating and kneeling. Once the serotonin had them drifting off into a nice little nap, it was easy as pie to lead them through whatever dream they were called on to have and write it off as a vision.

And there were plenty of canonized saints who’d gone down as great exorcists and fighters of demons when they’d spent a week and a half on the run from an uncorporated angel with a message straight from the desk of the Almighty. It didn’t matter how holy the tidings were; if they were delivered by a flaming chimaera with too many eyes and limbs that bent the wrong way, people tended to start flailing around with the holy water and trying to make it go away again and screaming bloody murder when it wouldn’t. Heaven, true to form, simply did not understand humanity. Crowley had thought a little better of Aziraphale though, given how well the angel liked them and how much time he spent out among them.

Maybe it was just an issue of Aziraphale not wanting to think that was all there was to it? Crowley breaking it down to well-timed chemical reactions and unusually intense natural processes might tread too hard on the toes of the ineffable that the angel clung to with such devotion. Of course, Crowley offering the figleaf of merely serving as a vehicle for the intentions of the divine would probably go over about as well as Eden’s first dinner party.

Crowley looked at the cooling remains of his food and wished he hadn’t promised to bring Aziraphale a meal. He’d done the job, tiresome though the whole thing had been, and he’d thought after a modest round of discreet but sincere thanks--maybe a warm squeeze of that soft hand, a little peck on the cheek from those pink lips, and _who the blessed fuck did he think he was kidding with_ that _?_ \--they’d both be happy to see the back of it. 

He hadn’t thought they’d argue over it, and he certainly hadn’t thought Aziraphale would get the bit between his teeth and trot out that old canard about everything demons couldn’t do. Crowley miracled the table clean with a snap of his fingers and planted the suggestion that his check needed to appear post haste. As if demons were just a peculiarly loathsome variety of worm, barely able to lift their heads from the dirt on account of God abandoning them.

Satan, if he dropped by the bookshop now, he might even have to listen to Aziraphale try to apologize by inadvertently cataloging every single way in which he considered demons despicable and vile and incapable of faking holiness for even the most human of audiences. Crowley’s stomach clenched around the mushrooms, and he wished he’d just skipped the place altogether. A heavy meal and an ill temper went together like hedgehogs and high-speed motorways, and he’d been around long enough to know it.

The waiter deposited his check and his artfully-wrapped carry-out in one go and had the poise not to register surprise that he’d somehow been talked into carry-out in the first place. Crowley stuffed a wad of bills into the fold, stared at the carry-out, and snapped his fingers. All safe and sound and sitting on the angel’s coffee table, no awkward conversations necessary. Shame about the cheesecake, but then his appetite had vanished anyway. Besides, he hadn’t exactly promised the angel dessert, and there was always whenever this whole thing would blow over. Which it would--Crowley knew it would. 

It never failed, Aziraphale needing him for something and Crowley going ruinously soft the moment it registered. Every so often the tables turned and it was Crowley needing something and Aziraphale scooping him up and lecturing him about being more cautious, or the wages of sin, or some rubbish like that, and all the while he’d be stroking Crowley’s scales, healing him and cleaning him up, and Crowley was ruinously soft for that, too. It was almost worth getting stabbed, having Aziraphale hovering over him and leaking love all over the place and trying everything at his disposal to extract a promise of caution.

Crowley gritted his teeth and pushed the thought away like he’d pushed his meal away. Best not to dwell on it--now, especially. 

Crowley straightened his jacket and sauntered out, obligations for the day finally discharged. He’d go home, watch some reality tv--he was due for a commendation for that one, and all he’d done was suggest that there was no need to deal with a writers union if the work could be fobbed off on editing with a little clever redefinition of terms--and sleep it off on the couch. 

Or maybe let his corporation really go and sleep it off coiled up in the plants. He hadn’t done that in a while, and it was always revoltingly pleasant, the sort of thing he could really get used to if he didn’t watch it. His corporation didn’t want to have limbs, really; it didn’t want to walk upright or wear clothes or talk. It’d be easy as closing his eyes, slithering out of a man’s shape and forgetting all about it, forgetting the way an angel sometimes went doe-eyed when he looked at Crowley’s hands. No more hurtful little arguments, no more deniable little favors, just some peace and blessed quiet until he got recalled for shirking and put on notice.

Crowley shoved his hands in his pockets and forced himself to let it go. It was just a row. Aziraphale hadn’t meant it. He never meant it. Crowley knew better than to be so sensitive about the tripe the ineffable goon squad had spoon-fed one stray principality. It wasn’t on to get angry with Aziraphale for being so trusting of them when the entire reason Crowley was even in a position to get angry in the first place was Aziraphale being so trusting of him. Angels who believed a single, solitary word out of a demon’s mouth certainly weren’t going to look askance at anything coming out of another angel’s.

The whole thing was foolish, anyway. He was one of the Fallen, and if anybody caught him wibble-lipped and mopey over an angel saying something mean, he’d be in for a swift and efficient recalibration of his definition of ‘hurt feelings.’

* * *

Aziraphale fixed himself a cup of chamomile tea and told himself to calm down. It had only been a row. It happened, sometimes; Crowley had the devil’s own arrogance throwing fuel on the fire, even when it had been nothing at all to start out with. Crowley would come back, and Aziraphale would explain what he’d meant. Aziraphale would say it was a misunderstanding, and Crowley would keep sulking, just a little, until Aziraphale offered to make it up to him. 

Crowley would suggest some ridiculously exorbitant wine or liquor that Aziraphale had been saving for a special occasion, something that Crowley had gotten for him in the first place. He’d throw the demand down like a gauntlet, and Aziraphale would trip over himself fetching it, nothing too good or too dear if it let him prove his contrition. Crowley throwing that studied, controlled tantrum over something meaningless, Aziraphale filling a glass instead of admitting any sort of real fault; it might as well be a minuet, their moves precise and proscribed and covering all the things it was best not to say aloud. 

Maybe this time, Crowley would pretend to be drunker than he was and curl against Aziraphale’s side. Maybe this time, Aziraphale would stroke that pretty hair Crowley was letting get a bit long again and tell him that he shouldn’t be so quick to look for offense where none were meant. Maybe this time, Crowley would turn his face and straighten his spine and stretch up and kiss him…

Aziraphale blinked at looked at the tea, aghast at himself. At best, Crowley would leave something of his behind, pretend to forget it, add another piece of himself to Aziraphale’s life in a physical, concrete way that Aziraphale could layer in with the books and fold into the core of his bailiwick and weave into the tapestry he was making here. At best, Crowley would bring him another bottle and give them both another excuse to keep this going, one more installment paid up on the insurance plan. It would be wonderful--the best either of them could hope for--but it all depended on him being a great deal more cautious than _that_. 

Crowley fussed and glowered over Aziraphale doting on him when he was undeniably injured or otherwise vulnerable; God only knew how the serpent would react to Aziraphale kissing him. There was nothing to hide behind, with a kiss--no _if I don’t clean this, it will get infected_ or _if I don’t get this off, I can’t see what I’m healing_ to be found. If he cupped Crowley’s face in his hands and kissed those clever lips, it would only be because that was what he wanted to do. And if it was affection instead of necessity, well… who knew how a demon who regularly pitched fits at being absently called ‘nice’ or ‘kind’ was going to react to that?

Aziraphale turned back to the shop and stumbled to a halt, staring dumbly at the carton of food on his table, a carton which had very certainly not been there a moment ago. If he opened it, he had no doubt that he’d find a lasagne, just as Crowley had promised. Aziraphale set his tea down and blinked back an irrational prickle of tears. He found himself suddenly without an appetite, in spite of what was doubtless a meal fit for a king. Fit for a king, and courtesy of a demon still too angry with him to deliver it in person. Aziraphale shook his head. Let Crowley be angry, then. There was nothing Aziraphale could do to turn Crowley’s foolhardy masquerade as a divine messenger into anything good, and he wouldn’t countenance Crowley flirting with discorporation or worse.

Aziraphale shook his head, looked at the carry-out, and miracled it untouched into the hands of the nearest person going without. At least one of them could still have a sense of their appropriate spheres.


	2. Chapter 2

Aziraphale twisted the ring on his finger nervously and lifted his hand to ring the bell. The cobra sculpture surrounding the buzzer looked like it might strike him if he tried it, and Aziraphale rolled his eyes and huffed at his own dithering. Crowley had cancelled lunch for the second time in a row, not sent him a declaration of war.

He tried the knob and found that it still opened for him, and that was as good as an invitation, wasn’t it? He could feel Crowley lurking somewhere inside the flat, no other demonic auras or inconvenient humans present, and this solved the problem of what to do if Crowley just ignored him knocking rather neatly. Crowley couldn’t pretend he hadn’t heard the bell if Aziraphale simply let himself in and launched directly into an apology.

Aziraphale had even rehearsed it, so there wouldn’t be the temptation to stray off course and say something new to rile Crowley up. A simple, straightforward acknowledgement that Crowley had been trying to help, a reiteration that Aziraphale had only been concerned for Crowley’s safety and their arrangement remaining undiscovered, and an apology for having been less than delicate in his expression of the first two points. It helped, really, that he hadn’t heard a peep out of head office about the whole thing.

There would, of course, be no acknowledgement if he performed up to their expectations. That had been de rigueur practically from the beginning, and he was sure of it from the few times he’d been uneasy enough to check in with them afterwards. Everything going according to plan merited a raised eyebrow and a “Yes, of course.” and a pointed counter-query as to whether there was something specific they should be on the look-out for. It most certainly did not merit praise or a clap on the back or even a terse “Well done.”

Aziraphale couldn’t imagine Gabriel watching a demon pull the whole thing off like an especially smooth magic trick and not having _something_ to say about it in the ensuing week. The wheels of Heaven didn’t always move as quickly as they could, but an incident like that? Aziraphale would have been called Upstairs for an explanation within the first day or two, if anyone had noticed.

So this time, at least, he’d fretted over nothing and had an argument with Crowley over nothing and insulted Crowley over nothing. And next time… well, so long as he made it clear that there wasn’t to be a repetition, he could apologize to Crowley with a clear conscience and no further worrying necessary. They’d gotten lucky, this time. He’d make Crowley understand that they might not, next time. Everything would be as it was, with no further squabbling or snubbing.

Aziraphale closed the door quietly behind him. “Crowley? It’s me.”

Silence was his only reply. Aziraphale frowned. The irritable creature couldn’t be asleep, could he? Crowley was fond of his inconvenient naps, but those usually saw him leaving some particularly infuriating message on his ansaphone claiming to be on holiday and then not getting back to anyone for months. He wasn’t in the habit of taking the initiative of ringing Aziraphale up and cancelling their plans before going back to bed. Aziraphale’s cheeks colored at the thought of Crowley dressed in some carelessly-wrapped silk gown, hair loose and brushing his shoulders as he flounced back to his bed and flung himself across it.

Perhaps Aziraphale should have knocked, but it was too late now, and besides, it wasn’t as if he was creeping about the flat unannounced.

“Crowley?” he called again, venturing past the foyer. It reminded him a bit of Heaven, with its chilly, bleached surfaces, and he didn’t like to think of Crowley spending so much time in a place like this. Of course, it had to have some appeal if Crowley had decorated it this way himself. Aziraphale just couldn’t see what it might be.

The living room was a bit better, though Aziraphale had preferred it back in the ‘50s, when it had been decorated with plush area rugs and stained wood and leather. The whole thing had been stately and comfortable, with a certain restrained gravitas. It was too streamlined now, all sharp edges and harsh angles and stripped of any hint of color that wasn’t red, bloodless where it wasn’t exsanguinating. 

Aziraphale tried to keep the judgment off his face. He could run into Crowley at any moment, and the last thing he needed was to have his carefully-crafted apology preempted by a snippy question about how he liked the decor. Well, maybe not the last thing he needed--that would be his devil in the flesh, barely keeping his robe closed with one hand and gesturing with the other and embodying false modesty from tip to toe. The second to last thing, then. 

Aziraphale turned around, trying to get his bearings, and frowned. Except he seemed to have run out of apartment, hadn’t he, and that couldn’t be right. He knew at the very least Crowley had a bedroom on top of everything that Aziraphale had seen so far, and he didn’t see the demon sacrificing that much in pursuit of the latest and most fashionable floorplan.

Aziraphale tilted his head and looked around, then brightened. The stone wall to his right wasn’t a wall at all, but a door on a central pivot. Aziraphale smiled fondly. Crowley’d doubtless gotten that idea out of one of the James Bond films he liked so well. Aziraphale had thought the novels were a bit dreadful, but Crowley was keen enough on the adaptations to forget himself and light up whenever there was a new one out, hands going animated and words spilling quick and unmeasured from his lips. He’d never gotten Crowley to take him along to see one, had he? Crowley went all mumbly and vague about them not being Aziraphale’s speed, then put him off with some vague assurance that there would be another out in a few years. Aziraphale had considered going by himself, just to see what the appeal was, but he knew it wouldn’t be the same without Crowley serving as a lens.

Aziraphale pushed weakly on one side of the door, ready for an alarm or the stop of a deadbolt or some flinty scrape of stone on stone. The slab moved easily, unlocked and unobstructed, its weight perfectly counterbalanced on its axis. No klaxon began to sound, and Aziraphale’s shoulders drifted back down from where they’d bunched around his ears. He pushed a little harder, just enough to turn the thing into a proper doorway, and barely stifled a gasp when he looked beyond it.

The entire room was a garden--gorgeous, serene, and perfect. Aziraphale couldn’t help the pang in his heart at it. Crowley never did anything by halves, did he? 

Aziraphale closed his eyes and breathed in slowly, savoring that rich green smell of plants completely occupying a space. The air _tasted_ lush, and this, _this_ was where he wanted to think of Crowley spending his time. The air was cool without being cold, and humid without being damp, and all of it without the acrid undercurrent of pesticides and harsh fertilizers that commercial greenhouses came with. The plants were healthy and cared-for, and Aziraphale could feel the attention Crowley lavished on them in every square inch of space. It reminded him of nothing so much as Eden, before anything in the world had known neglect or want or decay. He reached out and ran his finger over the edge of a leaf, unable to help himself.

“How wonderful,” he murmured. Maybe this was what had been missing from the bookshop, absent from the catalog of things Crowley had left with him over the years. Once Crowley had forgiven him, perhaps Aziraphale could hint that he’d like a plant or two, if Crowley could spare the time to help him choose something that would do well in the bookshop.

Aziraphale shook himself out of the reverie. Once Crowley had forgiven him being the operative part of that thought--he was getting ahead of himself.

“Crowley?” he called again, not raising his voice much. It seemed inappropriate to shout, the garden suggesting a meditative peace in the same way temples and cathedrals inspired a certain measure of awed silence.

He sighed at the lack of response, then turned when he heard Crowley’s voice deeper in the flat. He sounded far away, tinny, the rich timbre of his voice flattened and--ah. Not Crowley, but the outgoing message on the ansaphone. Maybe Crowley was asleep, after all, if he’d turned the ringer off on the phone. 

Aziraphale imagined the response he’d get, shaking Crowley awake and trying to deliver his apology to a fuddled and cranky snake while looming over him in his bed. It wouldn’t be well-received, he knew that much, and God help him if his eyes darted to the inevitable patches of inadvertently exposed flesh. He might as well try kissing Crowley awake, if he was going to do any of that; it would provoke about the same reaction.

Aziraphale shook himself and turned back to the plants, except this time there was a brilliant figure standing between him and the garden, white-robed and slender and wings spread as far as the space would allow, all of it pouring a blinding white light. The realization of what it meant for there to be another angel in Crowley’s flat hit him like a bullet to the breast, and Aziraphale didn’t stop to think any further than that.

“What have you _done_?” He lunged forward, fists knotting in the soft white linen of the angel’s robes, squinting against the holy glare and wishing for the first time in almost six thousand years that he still had his sword. Crowley was there, alive--Aziraphale had felt him, just a few minutes ago. He might not be too late; there was hope yet, there had to be. Aziraphale silently cursed his dithering in the hall, his slow examination of the color scheme, every damned second he’d wasted while whatever horror this was had been brewing and him not in place to stop it.

Aziraphale shoved the intruder against the wall and pinned them there, and he didn’t have anything resembling a plan, he was thoroughly and completely done for if they got their own weapon out, but what did it matter so long as--

“Oof!” 

The white light flickered, then went out, and Aziraphale found himself staring wildly into familiar amber eyes.

“Mind letting up a bit there, angel?” Crowley asked, squirming uncomfortably against Aziraphale’s clenched fists.

Aziraphale let go and stepped back, hands falling to his sides. He gaped at Crowley, unable to reconcile the demon standing before him in white robes with what he’d thought had happened, with what he could have just done with his own two hands. His heart was quivering in his chest like the first time he’d seen a catapult in action and realized what it meant for the fragile mortals he was charged with guiding.

“You all right?” Crowley asked, smoothing down the front of his robes and furling his wings. They were black, the same as they always were; it had only been a trick of the light that had been billowing from everywhere and everything at once. Crowley rolled his shoulders and stifled a wince, and Aziraphale hadn’t paid any attention to how hard he’d thrown him, hadn’t cared when he’d thought…

“You know, I think…” Aziraphale swallowed. “I think I’ve been better.”

His knees bent, legs giving way slowly like a tower collapsing from its base, like improperly-baked bricks crumbling under some insupportable weight, and he’d seen that so many times down through the ages. It was such a curious sensation, experiencing it for himself. It was all fine, though, he was sure--he could hit the polished stone floor as hard as he liked and not feel a thing through the fog he was swimming in. He didn’t have the chance to see if he was right about that one, though; Crowley darted forward light as quicksilver and just as fluid. The demon caught him by the waist, lowering him slowly and gently to the floor.

“Come on, angel, it was only a little joke,” Crowley murmured, bracing Aziraphale’s back against his chest and smoothing Aziraphale’s hair from his face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you, everything’s all right.”

“I thought...” That poisonous swarm of assumptions that he’d made in the handful of seconds between being confronted with the horror of another angel in Crowley’s home and knowing it wasn’t so all battered at him now. Aziraphale swallowed again and closed his eyes, focusing on Crowley’s arms around him and Crowley’s hands on him and Crowley’s voice in his ear. “I thought they’d found out. I thought you didn’t answer because you were… because you were…”

He exhaled, his breath shuddering against his ribs and catching in his throat, and Crowley stroked his hair and rocked him.

“No, no. Angel, everything’s fine, I’m sorry.” Crowley hugged him tighter, and Aziraphale managed to wrap his hands around the demon’s wrists in case he moved to let go. He’d burst into tears if Crowley let go, he knew he would. “I was just getting a bit of shut-eye in with the plants, yeah? Nice day for it and all that, nothing else on for the rest of the afternoon. Then you were there, and I thought--ah. I mean, I didn’t expect you to actually be fooled, did I? Just to understand how a human would be.”

“You were very convincing,” Aziraphale managed.

“I’m sorry,” Crowley said again, pressing his face to Aziraphale’s shoulder. “I am, angel. I didn’t mean to send you flying into a righteous rage or make you think something’d gone wrong.”

Aziraphale relaxed against him by degrees, the shaking in his limbs subsiding slowly. He’d never let himself think about what it might be like, if it happened. Somehow he’d always assumed it would be Hell coming for Crowley, that he could do something about it, that he stood a chance against it. That he could guard against it, however laughably ineffective he’d been against the last demon to try slipping past him. Crowley stopped rocking him and instead just held him, and Aziraphale wanted to shout at him for his lack of consideration almost as much as Aziraphale wanted to twist around and hold him right back.

“White suits you,” he said instead, trying to dislodge the thought of Crowley struck down or captured from where it had gotten stuck in his mind.

“Leave off,” Crowley muttered, squeezing him harder for a moment. It was times like this when Aziraphale remembered that Crowley was a serpent, all lean muscle and coiling strength. “Avenging angel suits you, but you don’t see me chucking it at you like a rock, do you?”

Aziraphale flushed with shame. He must have looked like a proper fury; even during the War it had been necessity that had driven him, not the desperation he’d felt in that moment when he’d thought he might lose everything. Even that had been a clash of arms, not a brawl--his opponents had all had their own armor and shields, too.

“Oh.” Aziraphale tried to turn, and Crowley simply held fast and refused to let him. “Oh, tell me I didn’t hurt you. I wasn’t, it wasn’t--I didn’t mean to.”

“Few bruises, nothing that won’t blow over by suppertime,” Crowley assured him. “Bit flattering, really, thinking you’d lose your head like that in defense of a lowly--”

“Please,” Aziraphale said, flinching. He could imagine all the ways that sentence might end, hear them in a hundred different angels’ voices. How little compunction they’d have, if they happened across a demon in the field. How lightly they’d justify it to themselves, if they hurt him. “Please. Not right now.”

“In my defense,” Crowley amended, chastened. “I _am_ sorry, angel. If I’d thought for a second it would send you into a state, I wouldn’t’ve.”

Aziraphale closed his eyes and let himself go limp against Crowley’s corporation. It had all been in his head; there had never been any danger. He shouldn’t have been fooled. He’d never have to squint against a holy light, would he? And that sort of glow, that shape, with only one set of wings and not announcing themselves--none of it had been _quite_ right. 

Besides, he’d have sensed another angel there, when he’d checked to see if Crowley was home and alone. Just because he hadn’t specifically been looking for ethereal auras, he’d hardly have missed one if he’d found it. It was only that he’d been caught unawares. If Aziraphale had stopped to think for even the barest moment or two, he’d have realized that of course it was Crowley staging a demonstration in a fit of pique. 

Instead he’d let intuition take over and jumped to the conclusion he’d been most afraid of. He chuckled mirthlessly, and Crowley made a distressed noise almost in his ear.

“Angel?” he asked quietly.

“Must have been terribly effective on that poor woman you appeared to,” Aziraphale sighed.

“Ah.” Crowley shifted Aziraphale’s weight from his sternum to one shoulder. “I mean, I did start out with the traditional ‘be not afraid’ bit. And I didn’t want to blind the poor thing--the plasma flare was just enough to keep her from making out the details, not enough to make her go diving for a welder’s mask.”

“I’m sorry I doubted you,” Aziraphale told him after a moment. He’d thought that what, Crowley had decked himself out in a tinsel halo and sauntered in with a wave and a hello? Introduced himself as Gabriel and smirked over his sunglasses at the woman’s polite confusion? Of course Crowley would have come up with something clever.

Aziraphale’s shivering grew more pronounced. He hadn’t meant to panic, and he certainly hadn’t meant to let his adrenaline get this far out of control. He was cold, and shaking like a leaf, and he should do something about it. He didn’t want to straighten up and have Crowley let go of him--he wanted to wedge himself under Crowley’s arm and never let go--but they couldn’t sit there on the floor forever, could they?

“Could’ve done a better job explaining myself, probably,” Crowley muttered. 

He seemed to sense what Aziraphale was going for and wrapped his arms around Aziraphale’s chest to forestall it. Well, who was Aziraphale to argue? He’d just manhandled the poor serpent, and he’d been lucky fisticuffs had never been his forte, or it might have gone a great deal worse. If Crowley wanted to hang onto him for a bit longer, Aziraphale owed it to him not to protest.

“Not cold, are you?” Crowley asked, manifesting his wings again. He stretched them out in a full-bodied flexion, then wrapped the wings around them both, fluffing them a bit as he did so. Aziraphale couldn’t help but go languid and basking under that outpouring of warmth. “Happens sometimes, when people get a nasty shock.”

“That feels better,” Aziraphale confessed, letting the back of his head rest on Crowley’s shoulder. 

Those slender brows were furrowed, those expressive lips were pursed, and Aziraphale wanted very much to kiss the worry off Crowley’s face. Maybe it was mirrored on his own face, and Crowley might want the same. Aziraphale would owe it to him not to protest that, either. 

He shimmied back against Crowley, getting as close as he could, and his shivering began to subside. “I don’t know what I’d do, if something happened to you on account of me.”

“Well--” Crowley made a face and looked away, his cheeks coloring, and Aziraphale reached up and turned his chin back so the demon was facing him.

“I was afraid they’d be keeping a close watch on the job, given the detail the letter went into. I was afraid if they saw you, we’d be… _you_ ’d be in danger. You take such damnable risks sometimes, Crowley.”

“I did check, you know,” Crowley told him, face going jittery and tense. “I knew they weren’t. I assume they checked up afterwards, sure, but they weren’t hanging around watching live. Back-up plan in case they were was a bucket of ice water and a miracle hangover cure, if you really want to know.”

Aziraphale managed a dry, wrung-out laugh at that. “It should have been your first plan. I never would have asked you to stick your neck out like that, not just to spare me a bit of inconvenience.”

“Angel, you were so blessed--”

“It would have passed, Crowley,” Aziraphale said firmly. He thought of another angel, and Crowley torn to pieces and gone forever. They wouldn’t even understand what they’d done, what they’d destroyed. He pressed himself more firmly against the demon. “Probably a lot more comfortably than sitting around waiting to find out if we’d been discovered. When you called to cancel lunch the first time, I was afraid you were going to tell me that they were onto you but it was fine because you had some hare-brained scheme for getting out of it.”

“Hare-brained?” Crowley asked archly.

“My dear, you don’t think as well under pressure as you might.”

Crowley’s lips curled into a pout, and Aziraphale couldn’t help the burst of love warming his blood along with the heat from Crowley’s wings. Fussy, conceited devil--he was so easily vexed by anything other than the utmost confidence in his abilities, so hungry for Aziraphale’s applause.

“I’m blessed fucking brilliant at it when you’re not around,” Crowley hissed, his wings going tighter. The grip he had on Aziraphale, it was like he never meant to let go again, and Aziraphale found himself in silent and eager agreement with that plan. “It’s only when it’s you on the line that I can’t seem to string two words or half a plan together.”

“Ah.” Aziraphale cleared his throat. Not much he could say to that, not with his most recent performance still burned into his retinas. He liked to think he was normally a steady hand when it came down to it, but he’d gone all to pieces and all at once when he’d thought... “I really didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“A little startled is all,” Crowley assured him. “Cross my heart.”

Aziraphale sagged in Crowley’s arms, and those soft black wings curled even closer, and he made himself stop thinking for as long as the cold, unforgiving floor would let them.


	3. Chapter 3

Crowley stretched out on the sofa and tried to relax around Aziraphale’s nervous pacing. On anyone else, it would probably have just been classed as ‘moving,’ but he hadn’t fully realized until now just how blessed _slow_ the angel tended to be. 

Like a tortoise, Crowley thought. Or an aircraft carrier.

But there was purpose in the slowness. Left to his own devices, Aziraphale stopped, and thought, and came to a decision, and then executed it. It wasn’t until someone else came along and harassed him with obnoxious questions or unfair dictates or situations where there wasn’t a right decision to come to that he tended to devolve into this sort of back-and-forth dithering. It was all that external stimulus that did it, wound him up with the need to do something and not giving him any time to decide on what it was that needed doing.

Crowley counted himself blameless in the current moment; he’d only come over because Aziraphale had hinted they had something to discuss, which had turned out to be nothing of import. It had been a bit much, the angel going wide-eyed and innocent and claiming not to know why Crowley’d thought there was anything vital to be hashed out, but Crowley couldn’t bring himself to pick at it so close on the heels of having frightened Aziraphale out of his wits. He’d let it go, appeasing that last bit of slinking guilt. 

That negligible bit of readily-forgotten housekeeping out of the way, Aziraphale had closed up the shop without herding Crowley out first, opened a pleasant-enough grenache and put two glasses on the table, and seemed to settle in for a bit of reading. Crowley had thought he’d had a fair grasp on how the evening was to go, with all that evidence laid out in front of him. But as soon as he’d been engrossed in the latest issue of _Esquire_ \--and Aziraphale would be tickled pink in a month or so; some otherwise indistinguishable celebrity was trying to make ascots fashionable again--Aziraphale had set his book aside to frown at a few tomes that had wandered out of place. A stray customer had somehow threaded the needle of the bookshop’s hours earlier in the day, it seemed. They’d seized the precious opportunity to touch Aziraphale’s things and ruffle Aziraphale’s feathers, and it wouldn’t do at all.

“Vandals,” Aziraphale had muttered to himself, getting back up. He hadn’t sat down again since, and each book that was restored to its proper place somehow only revealed some new thing to huff and mutter over.

Crowley might have been able to tune it out, but the angel’s path from one task to the next and back again kept taking him right past the sofa across which Crowley was sprawled, and the tiny pauses as Aziraphale teetered between one option and another kept happening directly in Crowley’s line of sight. He might have assumed it was performative, designed to catch his attention and trigger some exploratory expedition into the uncharted realms of what Aziraphale might want, but it didn’t come with any of the side-eyed beseeching Crowley had become accustomed to in those moments. 

No, Aziraphale was simply and honestly aflutter, and he couldn’t help but advertise it. There was only so much space in the bookshop, big as it was, and all the rags and feather-dusters and furniture polish to be used on the things in the front room were kept in the back room.

“You do recall you can just miracle anything that’s bothering you into a state of perfect cleanliness, yeah, angel?” Crowley asked. 

He watched Aziraphale’s face, the shift of his features as he registered the suggestion and mentally tried it out, measuring what it would do against what he wanted. Crowley could all but feel the angel seesawing over it, wobbling like a badly-balanced scale; Aziraphale couldn’t decide, because Aziraphale didn’t know what it was he wanted.

“I don’t need it _perfectly_ clean,” Aziraphale tutted, his lips pursing. “That would be much too much--it wouldn’t feel lived in anymore. And people would think they could just browse everything, if it was perfectly clean. They might think it was under new management, and they could just buy whatever they pleased, if it was perfectly clean.” He bit his lip and sighed. “I only want it a little bit less dusty, is all.”

Crowley tossed the magazine aside and got to his feet. “How much less dusty?”

“Oh, sit back down, I’m handling this.” Aziraphale’s brow creased prettily, and he waved the feather-duster at Crowley. He turned back to the offending shelf, and Crowley wrapped his hands around those plush shoulders in their thick cardigan. “Crowley!”

There was a loosening to Aziraphale’s frame under his hands, though--a feeling like a string still barely sounding a note had suddenly had a silencing finger placed on it--and Crowley had to stifle a hum of his own as the pieces fell into place.

“You don’t give a damn about the shelves at all,” Crowley said, letting his grip go just a hair tighter when Aziraphale squirmed. “You’re _fretting_.”

“I am not,” Aziraphale protested, turning his head to shoot Crowley a narrow look. “Oh, good Lord--you’re literally at my shoulder. Stop it.”

“Angel, you invited me over here on under false pretenses, and you got me to stay by offering me drink, and now you can’t stop roaming about the place keeping an eye on me.” It was hard to keep the teasing purr out of his voice, difficult to keep the proper levels of stern scolding in his tone. He might be at fault after all, but surely it wouldn’t be so difficult to fix it now that he’d gotten to the root of the problem.

“That’s an overstatement, at best,” Aziraphale said primly, his hands clasping around the handle of the feather-duster. The twitch of his lips gave him away, though, and Crowley plucked it from his grasp and tossed it aside.

“What is it that’s got you so riled up, now?” Crowley asked, steering him away from the shelves. Aziraphale frowned and tried to redirect them, but Crowley didn’t let up until he had Aziraphale sitting on the sofa and pouting about it. He dropped to one knee in front of the angel when Aziraphale tried to look down at the floor instead of at him, and Aziraphale colored slightly. “Come on, angel--out with it. What’ve I done?”

Aziraphale stopped cold at that, drawing himself up and looking down at Crowley in bewilderment.

“All right, then,” Crowley sighed, taking Aziraphale’s hands and rubbing his thumbs over Aziraphale’s knuckles. It wasn’t entirely a selfless act; the angel’s perfectly-manicured hands were so perfectly soft, it was difficult sometimes not to nibble at his fingers to see if they were sweet as well. And at least if those hands were trapped in his own, Crowley didn’t have to watch Aziraphale wring them. “If it’s not me, then what’ve you done?”

Aziraphale’s lips thinned, and he glanced away. “I haven’t done anything… that is to say, I haven’t done anything lately.” His eyes darted back to Crowley’s face, tracing down Crowley’s arms and landing at their intertwined hands. “It’s just difficult not to think of what might happen to you if I’m found out. Or, really, what I might have done in my fear that we had been.”

“We’re still stuck on that, are we?” Crowley asked. He’d guessed as much, but Aziraphale admitting it was the first step to Aziraphale letting him do something about it. He wanted to tilt Aziraphale’s chin back up and look in those lovely blue eyes of his--storm gray at the moment, but just as breathtaking as ever--but Crowley satisfied himself with the way Aziraphale wasn’t pulling his hands out of Crowley’s grasp. “Look, we’re not going to get found out. Nothing’s going to happen. And you didn’t do anything but knock the wind out of me for a moment. I know you, angel--you’re not the stab first, ask questions later sort.”

“You can’t be sure we won’t be discovered, and I could have just as easily done something terrible.” Aziraphale’s hands tightened on his. “You don’t understand how… Crowley, I was so _sure_ …”

Aziraphale stopped and took a deep breath, the dismay in his face tugging at Crowley’s heart.

“You’ve really been gnawing on this since the day of, haven’t you?” Crowley tilted his head. He’d thought Aziraphale had been better when he’d finally let the angel go. Not fine, not with how long it had taken before the trembling had stopped and how Aziraphale had clung to him when he’d picked the poor thing up off the floor and made him tea and held him close while he drank it. But steady, back on his feet, the worst of it blown over.

“I haven’t been gnawing on anything,” Aziraphale said firmly. “I’ve been carefully considering the possible implications of the situation.”

“You’ve been gnawing. Cracking open the bones and sucking at the marrow, all just to make yourself upset.” Crowley smiled mildly, the corners of his mouth only just turning up. Could he reach up and run his hands through that blond hair? Would Aziraphale let him? He’d accepted Crowley’s wings wrapped around him easily enough in the heat of the moment, but they were a far cry from that crisis now. This was just a minor aftershock, a bit of rubble-clearing and sweeping up after the main event.

It was a shame he couldn’t take the angel’s fear and worry away the same way he’d banished it from the woman Aziraphale was meant to give a vision. Then again… Crowley brightened suddenly. That was an idea, wasn’t it? And it would work in more or less the same way--it was just chemicals bouncing around a corporation, after all. No reason he couldn’t give the angel something else to gnaw on for a bit. 

“Here, I’ve got an idea.”

“I think you’ve had enough ideas for a while, don’t you?” Aziraphale asked, frowning.

“No, don’t make that face,” Crowley chuckled, reaching up and smoothing the lines away with his thumb. Bolder than he’d have risked, but then he’d never get a favorable answer if Aziraphale wasn’t just a little on the back foot when he asked. “It’ll stick that way, angel, and then where will we be? I’ll have to do all your appearances for you.”

Aziraphale batted his hand away and scowled at him, rearing back and trying to wriggle out of reach, and Crowley crossed his arms over the angel’s knees and rested his chin on his forearms. Aziraphale stared down at him, at that, and swallowed.

“I’m not leaving you to wear a hole in the carpet worrying because of something I did,” Crowley told him. “Without permission and over your objections, as you have pointed out on more than one occasion.”

“That’s not what I--”

“Might as well get it over with and let me have a crack at fixing this.” Crowley went to bat his eyelashes and then remembered he was wearing his glasses. Ah, well--probably for the best, anyway. Drawing attention to his serpent’s eyes could only remind Aziraphale of why he shouldn’t listen to anything out of Crowley’s mouth. He’d gotten used to his eyes over the ages, and it was too easy to forget what they meant to anyone else getting a peek at them.

“Fine,” Aziraphale sighed, crossing his arms and leaning back. “I suppose I can at least hear you out before I tell you no.”

“Such a fair and impartial judge I find myself before,” Crowley laughed. He tipped his head and laid his cheek on his arm. It had been a long time since he’d played the coquette, and it felt clumsy and artless. All the same, Aziraphale looked down at him, transfixed, and flushed. “You’ve been upset since you mistook me for a meddlesome angel. Let me soothe those poor frazzled nerves, hmm?”

“I’m not letting you get me drunk again,” Aziraphale said, grimacing. “That’s how all this trouble started in the first place.”

“I’m not suggesting we get drunk. I’m suggesting that you,” Crowley leaned back and lifted Aziraphale’s legs onto the couch, turning the angel’s hips as he went, “lie down, close your eyes, and let me demonstrate how the rest of it went.”

“Crowley!” Aziraphale flushed more deeply as Crowley rose and pressed Aziraphale’s shoulders down, hands open and touch delicate, quick to rearrange the cushions as he went so the angel’s head came to rest on a pillow instead of the wooden arm. 

He folded Aziraphale’s hands one over the other atop the golden pocket watch the angel insisted on wearing, smiling tenderly. It would be too big of an ask to let him run through the rest of the routine--be not afraid, thou hast found favor with thy Lord--but he didn’t need it anyway. It was foreplay, really, stage-setting so that what came next was interpreted correctly. Saying things like that to Aziraphale would just lead to the angel taking it as mockery.

“Shh, angel. Clear your mind. Relax, as best you can. Breathe.” Crowley patted Aziraphale’s fingers and sat down on the edge of the sofa, glad the frame was generous enough to permit both of them comfortably. It would be awkward to do this from the floor, and he didn’t want to stand there looming over him like a ghoul. “Close your eyes, there’s a good principality.”

“I am not closing my eyes. God only knows what you’d get up to,” Aziraphale groused. He didn’t stir otherwise, though, and a different sort of tension thrummed through his body when Crowley touched him.

Well, Crowley would soon get rid of that, too. “Suit yourself.”

He’d prefer not to work with that heavy gaze on him, those lovely eyes studying his face, but he’d worked under far more adverse conditions, hadn’t he? This was the closest thing he’d get to paradise again, this bookshop with its trusting angel, and if it was easier to work without an audience at all, at least this time the audience was a glorious and beatific one.

He took one of Aziraphale’s hands in his left and stretched out his right, laying his fingers lightly on Aziraphale’s forehead. “Your prayers have been heard, my child, and answered.”

“Crowley!” It was a quiet gasp this time, Aziraphale’s eyes going narrow and surprised at Crowley’s boldness. “Stop blaspheming.”

“But the blaspheming’s half the fun,” Crowley protested, grinning. He applied just the faintest beginnings of power while Aziraphale was distracted, a build-up in the right hormone here, a stimulation of the right gland there. Enough to make everything feel better without being overwhelming. That would come later, when he was ready for it. “Succor is here at last--”

“Crowley--” Aziraphale’s eyes softened, then widened, and his hand turned, curled around Crowley’s, and tightened fitfully. “Oh. What’s…”

He exhaled slowly, shifting into a more comfortable position where he lay on the couch. He stretched a bit, limbs loosening, and Crowley rubbed his thumb over the back of Aziraphale’s knuckles comfortingly. Comforting them both, really--the angel’s skin was like a rabbit’s ear, so delicate it was all but velvet.

“Just let yourself get lost in it, angel,” Crowley told him, nudging Aziraphale’s corporation deeper into the first stages of bliss.

“ _Oh_ ,” Aziraphale breathed. “Oh, Crowley, I don’t think--”

“Mmm. Best for the moment, not thinking,” Crowley agreed, smiling. He pulled those strands a little tighter, drawing Aziraphale deeper into it, and Aziraphale stiffened against the cushions, his cheeks coloring more vividly. “You don’t really want to stop, do you?”

“Not stop, but…” Aziraphale squirmed, his eyes darkening. He looked at Crowley, a deep longing in his eyes that caught Crowley off-guard and made his lungs hitch in his chest. Crowley let the fingers resting on Aziraphale’s brow turn into a hand cupping Aziraphale’s cheek without thinking, and Aziraphale sighed and laid his own hand over it, turning his face into that warmth. “Yes--there.”

Crowley faltered, his mouth going dry. He hadn’t considered what he might be doing, back in his flat, until Aziraphale’s fists had been bunched in that white robe that didn’t really suit Crowley at all, and his back had been colliding with the hard stone of his own walls, and Aziraphale’s beautiful eyes had been alight with anger and fear and loss. _“What have you done?”_ he’d asked, and that lovely voice that Crowley could listen to witter on about nothing for hours and rejoice in it had never been made to sound so lost or ragged.

Crowley hadn’t really considered what he might be doing now, either, beyond the bare fact of not wanting Aziraphale to waste another moment chafing himself raw over Crowley’s mistakes. Bad enough that Crowley had had to grovel a bit before the angel would finally forgive him his transgressions, bad enough that Aziraphale had still been forlorn and on edge when he’d left the flat, but that Aziraphale had gone home and proceeded to pick at the scab for half a week was intolerable. 

And now here they were, with Crowley guiding Aziraphale’s corporation down the inexorable path to a blissful little paroxysm and a well-earned little nap, and Aziraphale going open and warm and pliant under Crowley’s hands, melting like a fine chocolate too near a flame. Crowley really hadn’t needed to know what Aziraphale would look like-- _sound_ like--so close to coming, had he? Bad enough he knew now how the angel would fit in his wings, in his arms, between his thighs. Bad enough he knew what it would be like with the angel curled against his chest, his face in the angel’s hair. Bad enough he knew now what it felt like to have his traitor heart beat _I love you_ against his ribs, trying to make the angel hear it.

“Just close your eyes, angel,” Crowley murmured, letting the edge of his thumb stroke along that beautiful cheekbone. “Close your eyes and think of whatever it is you like best, hmm?”

Aziraphale shivered, his lids drooping but not closing, his eyes never leaving Crowley’s face. “This isn’t grace.”

“Never said it was,” Crowley countered placidly. He wasn’t capable of rising to any sort of challenge, not with Aziraphale in his arms like this, looking at him like this. “Just the next best thing, for what’s ailing you now.”

He scaled the application up just a tick, careful not to overdo it, and Aziraphale’s grip on his hand grew more insistent. 

“I’m so warm, Crowley.” He sighed slowly, and then the bow tie and cardigan were gone, the remaining shirt half undone. He dragged Crowley’s hand up and pressed it to his breast, the fine curls over the silken skin burning Crowley’s fingers like holy fire. Oh, but Crowley had made a mistake with this. “Can you feel how I’m burning up?”

“Just a bit of a flush, angel,” Crowley assured him. He wanted to close his own eyes against the sight, but he didn’t dare. Just a bit more, and then he could wrap the angel up in a blanket and snap the blinds shut and crawl back to his flat and bless himself for a fool. “You’re doing so well for me, really, it’s like you were made for this.”

Pleasure, he meant, and he could bite his tongue in half with it. Aziraphale had been made for it, before everything had gone off the rails and no getting it back on track. Made for pleasure, then sent off to war. No blasphemy Crowley could ever invent or give voice to could compare to that.

Aziraphale wriggled against the sofa, restless and seeking something he couldn’t seem to find, and he moaned softly when Crowley pushed him a step farther toward their goal. “This isn’t how grace feels, Crowley, I’d know if it were.”

“It’s damn close to, angel. It’s just usually you’re all a bit--” _Sloppier,_ he wanted to say. Angels practically went around hurling the stuff like lightning bolts, let it smash into people like a tidal wave. It wasn’t on, doing it like that with just the materials at hand. It wasn’t really on doing it with grace, either, but who was he to lecture an angel over it? “--less patient about it. More dramatic results, sure, but it’s harder on a corporation.”

Crowley tugged the lines of power tighter, tighter, winding them up in his hand and easing Aziraphale into it, and the angel in his hands shivered and arched. Just a little more, a little closer, and Aziraphale would tip over into that bliss, plunge through it, be baptized with it. He’d fall through it, leaving behind the stress and fear and worry, and emerge new and blinking into a better feeling than he’d left behind. Like a bear lumbering out of its den into a fresh springtime full of food and sun and the green smell of sap running and grass growing, happy to be alive and incapable of giving a fig for anything else for a while.

Aziraphale sighed, then pulled Crowley’s hand from his cheek to his hair, shifting against the cushions and pressing Crowley’s other hand firmly against his chest. “Let me see your wings again?”

Crowley almost loosened his hold on everything with that, startled by the request. What did his wings have to do with anything? Not that they weren’t pretty--he was proud enough of how nicely he’d kept them, over the years--but if the angel wanted pretty wings, he had a pair of his own that were more beautiful than anything Crowley could show him.

“If you like,” Crowley managed, manifesting them with a flourish. Aziraphale’s eyes went darker and his smile hungrier, almost wanton, and Crowley took the opportunity to tug him just a little farther along, a little deeper into that bliss.

Aziraphale moaned at that, hushed and throaty and abandoned, and Crowley felt an answering, aching tenderness bloom in his own heart. This had probably been the worst idea he’d ever had, up to and including whichever one it was that had been the last straw with the Almighty. Aziraphale wouldn’t likely remember much of what he’d done while Crowley had been moving endorphins around, or at least not with any great clarity. Crowley expected that very likely it was going to be burned into his own soul for the rest of eternity. The joy in Aziraphale’s face blossoming like a lily, Aziraphale’s hand clutching his, Aziraphale’s mouth making those sounds…

“Crowley,” Aziraphale murmured, twisting half off the sofa and staring at him, “Crowley, please--kiss me!”

“Of course, angel,” Crowley said, very proud of himself for not choking on the words. He bent at the waist, pressed his lips to Aziraphale’s forehead, and then finished the job, giving him that last tiny push over the edge. Aziraphale let go of his hands and clutched at Crowley’s shirt, arching up against him and shivering, and Crowley gathered him up and held him through the shuddering aftermath of it. “There you go, angel. Just relax and let yourself sleep now. You deserve it, putting up with everything like you do.”

Aziraphale made a small, protesting noise that didn’t quite manage to get past his lips and clung to Crowley harder. “Lie down with me. I don’t want you to go.”

“Shh, ’m not going anywhere.” Crowley rubbed his back, in equal measure delighted by only the thin linen separating his hand from Aziraphale’s skin and wary of it. Aziraphale was liable to want a great many things right now that he’d be ashamed of when he woke up, if Crowley let it go too far. 

Crowley conjured a quilt and wrapped it around him, pulling it tight and pressing Aziraphale against his chest. 

“You’ve been so good, angel. So patient, and so kind, and so loving,” he murmured, racking his brain for all the sweet nothings Aziraphale might crave and never hear. “You’re so beautiful when you’re happy, angel. You’re happy now, yeah?”

“Mmm.” Aziraphale’s eyes fluttered shut, and then he yawned. “I’m very… content.”

“That’s the stuff,” Crowley said.

“It’s still not grace, though,” Aziraphale said quietly, his voice drowsy and drifting. Crowley tipped him carefully back down, letting him stretch out as he went. Once he seemed comfortable, Crowley tucked the blanket in around the angel’s legs and miracled off his shoes. The tranquil, gentle smile on Aziraphale’s face belied his statement; it was probably the closest thing Crowley had ever gotten to manifesting grace in someone else, even as an angel. They hadn’t known what it was to bring peace to each other before the Fall, anymore than they’d known what darkness was before there was light.

“I never said it was, angel.” Crowley drew the blanket up to Aziraphale’s chin and brushed that lovely blond hair off Aziraphale’s brow. “I never said it was.”

Crowley turned the lights off and settled into the armchair opposite the sofa, magazine in hand and no intention whatsoever of missing a moment of Aziraphale sleeping peacefully by trying to read it.

* * *

Aziraphale twisted his ring and glanced at the clock again. Not that he didn’t know what time it was. It just wasn’t like Crowley to be quite _this_ late. Maybe the demon had sussed out what it was Aziraphale really wanted, and he’d agreed to the assignation with no intentions of actually showing up? But then Crowley had never stood him up before, not without something terrible having been the cause of it. Surely if Crowley had puzzled him out, he’d have made up some ridiculous and clearly false excuse not to come instead of cheerfully agreeing and then not showing up.

Aziraphale frowned and sat down. He needed to relax at least a trifle, or he’d launch right into his speech as soon as Crowley showed up and ruin everything. He’d been entirely too trusting of Crowley last time, but that wasn’t liable to be the case with Crowley. Aziraphale would need to be careful, and keep an eye on things, and bait the hook well.

He pursed his lips and shivered at the memory of Crowley’s voice murmuring compliments in his ear, Crowley’s wings black as night and just as beautiful spreading around them, Crowley’s hands on his back. He’d wanted to pull Crowley down on top of him and kiss him, wanted to feel Crowley’s clever fingers skimming every inch of him. Aziraphale squirmed where he sat. It hadn’t been fair, to give him such a little taste and then leave him to it.

Crowley hadn’t even embraced him after he’d woken up, just a bare brush of fingertips as Crowley had taken the throw and folded it up smartly, handed him a cup of tea, helped him with his cardigan. It wasn’t Aziraphale’s fault that he wanted to clutch Crowley to him, was it? Not after something like that. Proper etiquette required an angel to cradle a human through a bout of ecstasy, and all right, maybe it was only to keep them from breaking their skulls on the floor and needing a good healing on top of everything else, and Crowley’s methods were less likely to produce anything so catastrophic, but still. 

Crowley had been unfaltering and sure of himself when they’d been huddled on the floor of his apartment, not hesitating even a moment to embrace and hold and damn near fold Aziraphale’s shivering corporation against his whole self. Less than ideal circumstances, certainly, but the knowledge was Aziraphale’s to keep no matter how he’d come by it. Now that he knew what it was to be wrapped up in Crowley, close enough to sense the blood rushing below the skin and feel that warmth seeping into his own pores, he’d wanted it again so terribly during Crowley’s impromptu demonstration.

The bell above the door jingled, and Aziraphale beamed.

“Sorry I’m late, angel. Traffic was light to the point I had to do something about it, and then it turned out I’d miscalculated the affected area.” Crowley tossed his coat onto the rack without looking, then produced a package from under his arm. “I know you said you didn’t care if I brought anything, but the shopgirl swore this pinot bianco--”

“Oh!” Aziraphale smiled. They hadn’t had one of those since… the Risorgimento. That had been such an odd time, hadn’t it? Exciting, but odd. “How lovely--just let me get some glasses.”

“What was it you wanted, anyway?” Crowley called after him, as Aziraphale bustled back after the flutes. “Nothing wrong, is there?”

“My dear, I believe I was quite specific about there being nothing wrong both when I left a message for you to call me back and then again when you called me back,” Aziraphale said, clicking his tongue. Now who was fretting? He gave Crowley a sly smile and set the glasses down on the table. “Let’s see here… I’ve got some montasio, I think that went quite well with it last time. And crostini, of course. What about--”

“Anything you want, angel, but just the wine for me,” Crowley interrupted, laughing. He snapped his fingers, and suddenly there was a speckling of sweat on the bottle like morning dew on a window, its contents perfectly chilled.

Aziraphale huffed and rolled his eyes, then couldn’t help but smile as Crowley pulled the cork and poured the wine. Just the wine for Crowley, right up until the bread and cheese and whatever else Aziraphale decided on was spread on the table, at which point the tempter would invariably find himself the tempted and eat up half the board, denying it all the while. Aziraphale snapped his fingers, and a lovely spread with cheese, bread, roasted garlic, and pâté appeared next to the wine.

“Come on, sit down,” Aziraphale coaxed, helping himself. He bit into the crostini and smiled as Crowley flopped into the chair, all gangling limbs and smirking regard. Such a lovely creature he’d found, up there on Eden’s wall.

“You didn’t just invite me over for a nosh and a tipple, did you?” Crowley demanded, his eyes widening and eyebrows climbing in mock-suspicion. “I could’ve had something on, angel.”

“You didn’t, and we both know it. But no, there was something I wanted to discuss. It just wasn’t urgent.” Aziraphale tilted his head and smiled, trying for innocent. It shouldn’t have been hard, really--he was a principality--but then he was dealing with someone who could literally smell duplicity and underhanded dealing.

“Oh. Well, then.” Crowley raised his glass. “Might as well let the cat out of the bag, don’t you think?”

“It’s rude to talk with your mouth full,” Aziraphale reminded him, taking another bite. Crowley slouched down more firmly and drank his wine, watching him thoughtfully. Aziraphale dabbed at his lips finally, then nodded to the windowsills. “I’ve been toying with the idea of getting some potted plants. Yours were so wonderful, and I thought it might help make things a bit less dreary in here during the winter, don’t you think?”

Crowley waved a hand absently. “Sure. I’ll pick you up some things, see how you get on with them.”

Aziraphale frowned. “You don’t want to… discuss it? At all?”

“It’s houseplants, not investment property in Greenland.” Crowley frowned and eyed the cheese, then uncoiled slightly and started piling a handful of crostini high with it. “Next week all right?”

“Certainly.” Aziraphale finished his bread and sipped at his wine. It was good; the saleslady Crowley had dealt with hadn’t steered him wrong. Aziraphale had thought there might be more to it than that, that Crowley might be vaguely interested in Aziraphale’s tastes or what he was thinking instead of just immediately deciding on what Crowley himself might…

Aziraphale paused and examined that thought from another angle. Crowley had required all of half an invitation to put his own touch on the bookshop’s landscape.

“You’ve already got some ideas about what might look nice where, then?” Aziraphale asked, pretending to focus on his drink.

“Hard not to,” Crowley snorted. “I’ve only been watching you flap about trying to make it less depressing every last blessed February for, oh, two hundred years now?”

“You haven’t. You didn’t set foot in here until 1805, and then you spent thirty years after that sleeping like the dead.”

Crowley shrugged. “Poetic license. But yes, I’ve got some ideas.” He crunched away at the bit of bread in his hands. “Expected it to be more of an argument, did you?”

“Of course I didn’t expect an argument,” Aziraphale told him, shaking his head. “You didn’t install that garden of yours out of a dislike of picking out and caring for plants. I just thought you might have a few more questions about what I liked or where I was thinking of putting things.”

“Ha!” Crowley grinned at him, then practically unhinged his jaw to polish off his crostini. “What you like is what’ll forgive you for forgetting to water it for a month and then drowning it in a misguided attempt at apology, and where you’ll put things is where they’ll get at least a bit of light and the occasional recollection that they exist.”

“Oh, that’s not--” Aziraphale began, slightly offended now.

“Don’t worry, angel--I know exactly what you like and where you’ll put things,” Crowley cut him off, raising a hand lightly dusted with crumbs. “Leave it to me.”

“You know, you really are very wicked sometimes,” Aziraphale scolded.

“You take that back, or I’m leaving,” Crowley sniffed. He grinned after a moment. “I’m dreadfully wicked all of the time.”

Aziraphale fought down a blush at the thought of him asking-- _begging_ \--Crowley to kiss him, and Crowley pressing his lips gently, delicately, to Aziraphale’s brow. He supposed for a certain definition of it, that was the most wicked thing Crowley could have done. A more carnal answer to his pleas might have slaked his thirst instead of leaving him burning with it for the last few days.

“I suppose you are, at that.” Aziraphale raised his glass and found Crowley watching him closely.

“That’s a look,” Crowley murmured.

“That thing you did… inducing an ecstatic episode without using grace.”

“Mmm?” Crowley sipped his wine, eyes suddenly on the table but without any sort of intent. A subtle stiffness had crept into Crowley’s posture, a bracing against whatever was to come next.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said, about how it’s preferable--”

“Did I say that?” Crowley asked, eyebrows climbing. “I mean, sure, preferable to that sort of wham-bam-thank you-angel sort of fit--”

“Could you let me finish, please?” Aziraphale sighed.

Crowley mumbled a few words of surrender and went back to his wine.

“Thank you.” Aziraphale frowned and rubbed his chin. “Where was I? Ah, right. I’ve been thinking about your claims that it’s preferable to, ah, _bestowing_ \--” Crowley snorted at that but didn’t say anything. “--the gift of God’s grace. Less likely to result in an unintended traumatic outcome and so forth.”

Crowley drank without lifting his eyes or relaxing in the slightest and waited for Aziraphale to continue.

“And I was thinking that you might have a… that is, you might not be completely off the mark. It’s an idea worth exploring.”

Crowley did look up at that, face pointed and cautious as a cat’s.

“But of course, if I’m going to deploy it in the field, as it were, I should probably test it out beforehand.” Aziraphale turned his glass in his hands, not daring to meet Crowley’s eyes. “Don’t you think?”

“Sound in theory,” Crowley allowed, his shoulders sliding to the side and his eyes narrowing. He looked like a snake rearing up from a coil, unsure of whether or not it would have to strike. “I’m not sure I follow on the application.”

“I’d need a, well, I suppose you could call it a volunteer. Someone to practice on?” Aziraphale finally lifted his eyes, hopeful.

Crowley stared at him, his throat bobbing. “You should take out a discreet ad in one of those gentlemen’s papers, angel. Loads of volunteers, plus a bit of walking-around money.”

“Don’t be crude,” Aziraphale scolded, lips twisting. It smarted, Crowley immediately deflecting like that, but it clearly wasn’t out of a lack of interest. “That’s not how it was when you did it for me, was it?”

The noise Crowley made was instructive, and Aziraphale filed away the information for later.

“Of course not!” Crowley snapped, the barest edge of a hiss slipping back into his voice. “But I’ve been doing it for a while, haven’t I? And besides, you haven’t manifested even the barest hint of a genital since public baths stopped being a thing.”

Aziraphale glared at him. What Aziraphale kept in his trousers was none of Crowley’s concern, especially if the serpent was going to talk about it in that sort of tone, but it was interesting that Crowley was keeping track, wasn’t it? “That’s not--”

“You, on the other hand, are probably going to spend a good bit of time accidentally overdoing it, and while the appropriately pre-screened subject pool isn’t going to complain, I expect the results will be fairly dramatic.” Crowley shoved himself firmly back in his chair and scowled. “It’s going to take you a bit to get the hang of being _nice_ about it, and I can’t say as I’m in the mood to get my brains scrambled on accident.”

“You can’t think I’d be as clumsy or as careless of your corporation as all that?” Aziraphale asked softly, his jaw working.

Crowley’s scowl deepened, and he drank his wine in silence until Aziraphale exhaled and looked down at his hands, resigned. This hadn’t been how he expected this to go.

“Not on purpose, no,” Crowley finally allowed, shoving his hair back out of his eyes. His fingers twitched toward where his pocket would have been if he’d still been wearing his jacket, subconsciously looking for his glasses.

“I’d start slowly and work my way up,” Aziraphale said, his voice holding more of a plea than he liked. “I’m not a bull thrashing around in a china shop, you know I’m not.”

He’d thought that what, Crowley would slither right into the chance for a return of the favor? Not if he was blunt about it, of course, but if he put it right and made his terms clear. Crowley had been so unbearably tender with him, had been so immediately forgiving of Aziraphale’s unwitting assault, that Aziraphale had thought it wouldn’t be such a difficult thing to persuade Crowley to permit him this.

Aziraphale looked at him and sighed. Those evasive eyes, the restless fingers, the aggressive slouch, the one foot stuck all the way out and kicking uneasily. _Who’s fretting now, dear?_

And how had Crowley dealt with that? Aziraphale thought of Crowley’s arms crossed across his knees, the cunning thing looking up at him and smiling, knowing full well what a pretty picture the demon curled up at his feet made. Well, two could play at that game, couldn’t they?

Aziraphale set his glass aside and stood up, and Crowley was edging toward sullen until he registered that Aziraphale was coming toward him rather than flitting to the back room for some missing ingredient. When Crowley saw that, he twitched upright and to the side, staring openly. Aziraphale slid carefully to his knees, one hand landing on Crowley’s leg to ground him and the other going to Crowley’s chin.

“Have I ever been anything but careful of you, my dear?”

Crowley sputtered and flushed, trying to turn away reflexively and stopped only by Aziraphale’s hand.

“Show me how it goes, won’t you?” Aziraphale asked, letting his voice go husky, and Crowley swallowed and closed his eyes. Aziraphale hadn’t spent the last thousand years picking up the occasional temptation for Crowley without learning a trick or two.

“Mercy, angel,” Crowley hissed, wrenching his face out of Aziraphale’s hand.

“Surely my reputation precedes me,” Aziraphale murmured, letting his hand fall to Crowley’s other knee instead. “Merciless. Implacable. Unyielding.”

“Awful.”

“That, too,” Aziraphale agreed. “Please, Crowley.”

Crowley looked down at him, lips twisting. _Yes,_ they wanted to say. _Don’t let this be a mistake_ , they wanted to say.

“You realize if you slip up and accidentally reach for the grace, it’s liable to make the walk down the aisle in that church look like a stroll down the promenade at St James.”

“I do.” Aziraphale shivered. He would never. “I haven’t done this enough times to have habits for good or ill, if it’s any reassurance.”

Crowley grunted, then exhaled sharply, his eyes darting. Trapped, for all that he could just as easily shake Aziraphale off and stalk from the shop as he’d done not so very long ago; Aziraphale wasn’t holding him with anything more than gravity and the lightest of touches.

“Is it really so upsetting?” Aziraphale asked. “Should I have been afraid of you?”

Crowley licked his lips. “I’ve never turned my back on you, angel.”

That one caught him unexpectedly, a fist to the belly he hadn’t seen coming. Crowley couldn’t really think… 

Aziraphale sat back on his haunches, all their arguments--all the times he’d thought nothing of denying the demon to anyone who would listen--flashing through his mind like quicksilver. Well, maybe Crowley could.

“I promise you, I won’t hurt you, or turn away from you, or leave you. Not in this.” It sounded glib, even in his own ears, but it was such an easy promise to make. He might not know what tomorrow would bring, or next year, or next century, but he could swear to shepherd a demon safely through a moment or two of peace right here and now.

Crowley’s eyes searched his, lips pursed and all but begging Aziraphale to mean it. “Even if I start turning up in scales or my eyes go all yellow?”

“Haven’t you done this before? Don’t you know what to expect?” Aziraphale asked, intuition leading him to tug on the thread before he realized how loose it might be. Crowley flushed and looked away, one sharp canine digging into his lip.

“Not exactly the sort of thing you can do for yourself, is it?” His whole posture was defensive, curling to hide that freshly exposed vulnerability. “It’s not like the old-fashioned way, where after a certain point your corporation just takes over and does what it does practically on auto-pilot. You’d be going uphill both ways, trying to finesse something as fiddly as that while the whole process needs you to let go and, I dunno, let it happen.”

“Give yourself over,” Aziraphale supplied. 

Crowley grunted and shrugged. “Suppose so.” 

Aziraphale had done it without question, once he’d understood what Crowley was guiding him toward. He’d only wanted a sweeter reward, Crowley holding him and wrapped up with him, those cherished lips breathing honeyed words in his ear. But it stood to reason that no, someone couldn’t give themselves over to themselves. There was an aspect of letting go to it that needed someone on the other side to do the gathering up.

“I promise that… if you give yourself over to me in this, you can trust me to hold you. No matter what happens, Crowley, I’ll take care of you.”

Crowley scoffed and shook his head. “And after?”

“What do you mean, after?” Aziraphale asked, confused. He’d been a bit lost in the thought of Crowley, loose and longing in his arms, his to care for until the paroxysm passed.

“I mean, when we’re both standing around afterwards, scuffing our shoes and staring at our feet and remembering what an idiot face I just pulled or wondering what the heaven that noise was supposed to have been or trying not to remember how disgusting something was--”

“I sincerely doubt there will be anything I find unpleasant, never mind disgusting, about you at peace.” Aziraphale stretched up and pressed a chaste kiss to Crowley’s forehead. “My dear, I promise I’m not going to hurt you. Not in this. At least let me try.”

Crowley stared at him for a long moment, face still, and Aziraphale tried to put every whispered _trust me_ he couldn’t say into his eyes.

“All right,” Crowley said, his whole body twitching back against the chair and his cheeks coloring. “Just… gimme a minute to get rid of something, would you?”

Aziraphale almost ruined everything by asking, and then again by entertaining an answering blush when he realized. Some wistful, absurd part of him wondered if it would really be so bad if Crowley didn’t get rid of anything, if Crowley came to him whole and as he preferred to exist in the world, but it was just that--absurd. What a demon had in his trousers was no more an angel’s concern than what Aziraphale had in his trousers was Crowley’s concern.

And besides, he told himself, this was a maiden voyage, of course. Best to keep it as uncomplicated and bloodless as possible.

* * *

Crowley writhed in his arms, panting in his ear, skin warm against Aziraphale’s neck. It was only the sharp need to see Crowley completely undone against him that kept Aziraphale focused; everything about the serpent going open and needy and wanting for him was crying out to Aziraphale to drink it in, inscribe it in his heart, enjoy it in case he never had its like again.

“Angel!” Crowley hissed, fingers gone sharp and strong as they dug into Aziraphale’s back. “I… I need… _hnng_ \--”

He curled tight against Aziraphale’s chest, head hanging over Aziraphale’s shoulder and face tucked against Aziraphale’s throat.

“Shh, I’ve got you,” Aziraphale soothed him, stroking down the length of Crowley’s spine and wishing he didn’t have to stop at his waistband, wishing there weren’t layers and layers of cloth between his palm and Crowley’s back. He wanted to pull Crowley into his lap, wanted to cuddle the demon against him, curl his wings around them, hold him close and keep him safe. It was such a strange thing--so like how he might feel about Crowley on any given day, but with a softness to it he didn’t recognize, a cracked-open quality that left him feeling naked and defenseless and bold and thrilling. It made him brave and terrified all at once, having Crowley like this. “Almost there, don’t you think?”

Crowley hissed again, this time completely wordless, and pressed his forehead to the soft expanse of skin behind Aziraphale’s jaw. Aziraphale let his arms curl tighter, confining Crowley’s squirming to a sort of flexing shift against Aziraphale’s chest and hip. They’d run out of sofa half an hour ago, and Aziraphale’s corporation was more giving than the arm of the couch. He reached up with one hand and caught Crowley’s hair in his fingers, and Crowley whimpered and clutched at him, sinews trembling and fingers crooking.

“Better be,” he muttered. “I don’t know how much more--”

Aziraphale nudged a bit more of the appropriate chemicals into being, and Crowley gasped, stiffening in Aziraphale’s grip. And there it was--the tipping point Crowley had described before they’d started this, the peak from which Aziraphale almost didn’t want to let him fall.

The wash of bliss and warmth and safety afterward was part of the whole point, he knew. But Crowley’s ecstatic cries were more beautiful than a thousand blandishments, and the heat pouring off the demon’s body warmed the very core of him, and the smell of his skin made Aziraphale want to bury his face in Crowley’s neck and never surface.

“So beautiful like this, my dear,” Aziraphale murmured, sure Crowley couldn’t hear him over his thrashing. He gentled Crowley through it, letting him down slowly, and then teased him with another, shorter burst of hormones.

“ _Angel_!”

And then Crowley was in his lap, pulling himself against Aziraphale as close as he could get with that last jerk of his hips, voice breaking at the crest of euphoria. Aziraphale could feel the red of his own cheeks, the desire pooling low in his belly and wicking up his spine, the love spilling over in his heart. 

_Precious, adored, beloved,_ he wanted to whisper, knowing Crowley would tolerate none of it. He’d made himself vulnerable in a way Aziraphale had never dared hope before, never thought Crowley might trust him with, unfurling inch by inch over the past hour, voice going soft and that limpid gold spreading over his eyes. Five minutes ago, Aziraphale could have done anything with him and gotten nothing more than a barely-audible whine of protest; he couldn’t open his mouth and risk Crowley regretting the decision now.

“I’ve got you, my dear, I do,” Aziraphale assured him, fingers going tight in Crowley’s hair. He had Crowley, and he never wanted to let go, and there was surely a way to fill his voice with everything that was too much for his heart. There was surely a way to say it without filling the air with dangerous words, a way to say it without giving Crowley some horrible impetus toward even greater carelessness.

_You hold my fate in your hands. Any hope of happiness I have, it rests with you. Have compassion and weigh your safety as dearly as I do._

Crowley drew a shivering, shuddering breath and sobbed into Aziraphale’s shoulder, and Aziraphale couldn’t help but kiss his hair. “You were so patient with me, Crowley. So wonderful. I couldn’t have asked for a better guide. You know that, don’t you?”

Crowley relaxed against him, and Aziraphale couldn’t help one last spurt of pleasure, intent dragging through Crowley’s corporation like a cool breeze over his skin. Crowley huffed and grunted, muscles tensing again before going loose as an untied ribbon.

“I could never thank you so well as you deserved, for this,” Aziraphale told him, voice all down-soft and silken honey. He wanted to keep the demon in his lap like this for hours, cradling him like this for the rest of the night. Longer, really, but there were limits. Dawn would come, and things might look different in the cold light of day. For now…

For now he could feel how perfectly Crowley fit in his arms, how lightly Crowley rested across his thighs. He’d never dared consider it before, not when it had all been born of necessity and fear and pain--Crowley bearing him up as he healed from some wound, him returning the favor when it was Crowley in harm’s way and hurting from it. He’d sensed how it might be, if they both lost all sense of reason and propriety and let themselves run headlong and reckless into the danger of it. He’d been afraid of it, of the poison lurking under the sweetness.

He’d glimpsed but a pale shadow. He’d been a coward. 

Aziraphale kissed Crowley’s hair again, breathing deep of that heady mix of Crowley’s skin and Crowley’s cologne and Crowley’s pleasure. Crowley’s fingers crooked into the slack of his cardigan, digging into Aziraphale’s flesh as he scrambled for some clumsy hold. The demon was coming back to himself, bit by bit, but there was no lessening of his need or space between his breath and Aziraphale’s skin.

“Take all the time you need,” Aziraphale murmured. “I’m in no hurry. I’ve got you.”

“You’ve got me, all right,” Crowley said, heavy and languid. “Think you blessed near killed me, angel.”

“It wasn’t so bad, surely?” Aziraphale asked, nuzzling him. Crowley shivered with it, mouth going slack and pink, and Aziraphale thought it would be the most natural thing in the world to kiss him, to lower him onto the sofa, to bend over him, to claim him. “Oh, tell me it wasn’t--I wanted it to be good for you.”

“Took a lot longer than I expected,” Crowley confessed, not making any move to withdraw. Aziraphale smiled at that and carded his fingers through Crowley’s hair, smoothing away the strands stuck to his skin with the thin sheen of sweat.

“Well, it was my first time,” Aziraphale pointed out. He wasn’t the least bit sorry, but he hadn’t meant to wear Crowley out quite as thoroughly as he seemed to have. “And I didn’t want to go too fast and, ah, upset the apple cart, as it were.”

Crowley snorted and wriggled, but his movements put him deeper in Aziraphale’s arms, more firmly in Aziraphale’s grasp. “Of course you didn’t want to go too fast.”

“Mmm.” Aziraphale hugged him firmly, and Crowley subsided readily. “I believe you were worried that I’d, what was it, scramble your brains?”

Crowley huffed and let his head rest against Aziraphale’s neck in favor of a pithy retort, then yawned. There was a certain heaviness stealing over Crowley’s corporation that Aziraphale thought might presage sleep, and it was customary at times like these to let oneself drift off, wasn’t it? He’d done it himself, and he wasn’t ordinarily prone to sleeping at all. Crowley was fond of indulging in it at the least opportunity and in the most inopportune places; he surely couldn’t resist the temptation to take a nap right now. Aziraphale swallowed thickly. 

What price wouldn’t he pay, if only it meant he could keep the demon sliding into a doze in his arms. As long as Crowley liked, as long as Crowley wanted, Aziraphale would hold him and be glad of it. Aziraphale smiled and tilted his head so that he could press a small, chaste kiss to Crowley’s temple. Crowley sighed and squirmed against him, nestling into his embrace.

“Was it all right?” Aziraphale asked, his lips brushing the tip of Crowley’s ear.

“Perfectly acceptable,” Crowley mumbled. His voice was bleary, and his eyes were barely open, and Aziraphale’s smile turned into something he could feel in the very depths of his heart. When he was sure Crowley wouldn’t start at it, he manifested his wings and curled them loosely about them, blotting out the rest of the bookshop. Well-loved as the place was, this was something he wanted to draw a veil across while he still had it.

Perfectly acceptable, the demon said. Well, if there was one thing Aziraphale had found over the centuries, it was that practice made perfect. He pressed his lips to Crowley’s hair and held the demon as he fell asleep.


End file.
